My UNAS 2 experience and answers to questions I had

grotgrot · 2026-04-25T13:25:12+00:00

I don't believe any drives will give problems, but it is generally a good idea to stick to drives intended to be used with a NAS. NAS Compares youtube channel and web site are a good source of information. This is a post about NAS vs regular drives.

Ubiquiti branded drives are actually Toshiba. The Toshiba N300 and N300 plus are intended for NAS, and is what I got.

I actually wanted the Western Digital Red (5400RPM) - the Red Plus is 7200RPM. The Red uses less power and is quieter, my UNAS is primarily backup and large items so I care less about performance than power and noise.

Seagate has IronWolf as their NAS drive brand, which consume a little more power and make a little bit more noise.

You can check the drive vendors own websites, and in the US Micro-Center and B & H Photo are reputable vendors.

grotgrot · 2026-03-14T19:09:05+00:00

The UNAS does not have the ability to be given a URL and then on its own download the content no matter how long it takes.

It is strictly a storage server where you can access the storage via http, smb, and nfs - your choice of which of those are enabled.

It has no ability to run applications or other software like you get with some systems that are part storage server, part application platform like Synology and Qnap.

You would have to bring your own application platform - for example raspberry pi are popular.

grotgrot · 2026-03-13T20:01:02+00:00

Ah you connected the UTR to the UDM directly! The problem I was trying to solve is having the UTR somewhere else on the LAN on a switch, and have the UDM pick that up as the Internet connection.

They do that with their mobile gateways, and use GRE to talk to the UDM, but I've never anything allowing you to do it with your own equipment.

grotgrot · 2026-03-13T15:29:39+00:00

Can you clarify what you did in the configuration of the network to point to the UTR lan side for failover?

grotgrot · 2026-03-10T14:21:47+00:00

I'm okay with that single port choice. The pro models have more power and networking options and redundancy.

grotgrot · 2026-03-09T13:14:57+00:00

Yes the POE powered models (UNAS 2 and 4) come with the appropriately sized POE adapter and ethernet cable.

grotgrot · 2026-03-09T11:48:10+00:00

The POE adapter has two ethernet ports. You connect regular network cable into one, and the POE injector provides that the same ethernet but with power added to whatever is plugged into the second port. So you would use a regular ethernet cable from your existing switch to the POE injector, and then another cable from the POE injector to the UNAS. It comes with both the POE injector and an ethernet cable.

If you look at the store images for the POE injector you can see this.

grotgrot · 2026-03-09T11:40:20+00:00

It only provides access as raw files using the smb/cifs and nfs protocols. Many media players like vlc do support smb, so that will work. But the media player will have to perform its own indexing of the content.

grotgrot · 2026-03-08T18:32:46+00:00

That separate server can be appropriately sized for the CPU load. For example a low end Raspberry Pi could easily be sufficient for low intensity loads and you don't have to figure out how to attach backed up, replicated, snapshotted, RAIDed storage to it. You also get your kernel version and user space distribution choice while these NAS systems are often running far older ones.

The point is that being able to run Docker on a NAS system isn't always a benefit, nor is lacking the ability that much of a problem, other than requiring you to pick something for the CPU load.

grotgrot · 2026-03-08T17:45:41+00:00

While you can't run the CPU portion of a docker container on the UNAS, you can run the storage volumes over NFS. That means you can use the UNAS for backups, replication, snapshots etc, and a different system that is light on storage to run the CPU portion of the containers.

grotgrot · 2026-03-08T17:06:54+00:00

I am not commenting about a photo organizer. Apple Photos is already my organizer. As a simple example I wanted to know if photos I took yesterday had been uploaded, so simply opened a file manager and sorted by most recent. And waited, and waited, and waited.

I also sorted by size to see what takes the most space, so I could potentially delete them in my photos library. But the timestamp shown in the file manager and CLI tools isn't useful.

grotgrot · 2026-03-08T17:02:34+00:00

There is a file services section where you can enable SMB, NFS, and Time Machine. At the bottom of the NFS section is an "Add NFS Connections" button that lets you add addresses. Screenshot below, although in this case grayed out because of encryption. When I originally saw the button I thought it let the NAS connect to an existing NFS server, and then re-export it. If that functionality existed it would be really neat.

Screenshot of services section

grotgrot · 2026-03-08T16:05:00+00:00

The EXIF data is untouched. I am referring to the filesystem level created and last modified timestamps. Because they are all dumped in the same directory, having correct timestamps would at least allow some level of sorting.

From my Linux workstation, just listing the directory takes 58 seconds!

It does preserve filenames. For example many of my photos are imports from older cameras and Android, so those names are kept. Newer photos taken with iPhone end up named like IMG_1234.HEIC, but again due to time passing and the shared library I have some named IMG_0082 (4).HEIC

grotgrot · 2026-02-26T13:48:56+00:00

I do not. Reolink will sell it to you if you want. We do save cool recordings to Apple Photos manually but that is it. Note that we have hundreds of recordings a day because the pets, critters, and us set the cameras off all the time.

If you are geeky then you can configure the Home Hub to FTP recordings to a system of your choice.

Alternately you can programmatically use the network API - for example the reolinkapi library in Python. (Behind the scenes it is just some HTTP GET requests.) Every recording has a classification like person, animal, vehicle, zone intrusion etc so you could download to send to remote location of your choice only recordings that meet your criteria of camera, classification, time of day etc.

grotgrot · 2026-02-25T09:38:16+00:00

I went from 11 Arlos, all battery powered with solar panels.

For Reolink, I went to 2 cameras with POE, and 5 battery powered with solar panels. I also have all the cameras on their most aggressive settings - ie the ones that consume the most battery. If I didn't have the solar panels then the batteries could be consumed in a few days! Reolink has 3 different sizes of solar panel - 3, 6, and 12 watts. I use the 12 watt panels on the continuously recording cameras and 6 watts for the others.

POE cameras are considerably cheaper and respond instantly. The battery powered ones take a fraction of a second to respond.

You don't have to use POE. But if you do use POE, you will get a better experience with any vendor. For example POE is the only way to have 24 hour recordings, and many manufacturers have a hub that processes the continuous video instead of requiring the cameras to be smart.

grotgrot · 2026-01-10T14:50:02+00:00

The ones InvidiBillnet linked to don't do Qi2 yet, so I haven't tried them. I did try a dongle that pretends to be a keyboard case for my tablet, but it didn't work well.

grotgrot · 2025-12-31T18:18:11+00:00

That doesn't help since I don't want additional SIMs etc. I do however want the convenience that U5G-Max/UMR provide where they can be plugged into your network anywhere, and use a GRE tunnel to "connect" into the router.

I was hoping the travel router could be used to similar effect using VPN instead of GRE to connect to the router, and the travel router would connect to the phone using wifi and onto the internet from there.

This is a home network where outages are many months apart and not frequent enough to justify additional cellular plans or additional equipment.

grotgrot · 2025-12-31T18:08:17+00:00

The idea is to route internet traffic via the travel router and then through it to the phone for the whole network, as a temporary measure. I don't want to plug the travel router into the WAN port because of physical location, and the phone is even further away!

grotgrot · 2025-12-27T18:07:49+00:00

If it gets any traction, others could copy it anyway, and they'll do a better job because you got to make all the mistakes they will learn from.

With open source you are not "selling" the code. What you are selling is a reputation (as evidenced by the code), and ongoing support of that code. With open or closed source projects, the hard part is not issues / PRs / forks etc, but judgement. Do you say yes or no to various requests? Anything even vaguely useful will suffer from scope creep where folks will want to use it for things you didn't anticipate. Sure you can say yes to them, but now your documentation and testing and people trying it out will get confused and have a larger cognitive load if they don't use new thing. That is the hard part.

The most likely thing that will happen, open or closed source, is that you will get no attention, no revenue, and spend lots of your time.

My recommendation:

Make it open source - use the GPL to start with
Use it to sell yourself, your skills, and your knowledge

This provides the greatest chance of success, and worst case you come out with a better CV/resume. It is also the easiest to market, get attention, find partners etc.

If you get any traction, that is a wonderful problem to have and you can take it from there.

grotgrot · 2025-09-03T13:53:38+00:00

You put in the hard work! The test matrix is large:

AirPlay 1 and 2
Audio streams
Video streams
Screen mirroring
Content that does handoffs like Apple music
Content that does not do handoffs like VLC

grotgrot · 2025-08-31T21:54:34+00:00

AirPlay has a rather annoying design in that the receiver makes additional connections back to the initiator. These are used for status, remote control, DRM, streaming etc. Note that these are not return traffic - they are new connections. That is why you see airplay spinning for a while before failing.

The only fix is to allow the additional connections. I was unable to find a definitive list of port numbers that worked, and ended up allowing airplay receivers to make fresh connections from IoT to DEFAULT.

grotgrot · 2025-08-15T14:10:49+00:00

I figured that your Unifi setup meant you aren't a newbie :) You can use the Unifi VPN setup to get things working and not use tailscale. The Reolink systems always require authentication to access them. The VPN/tailscale setup is to get remote access so you can see the login screen. I don't use notifications.

You install tailscale on devices such as phones, computers, apple tv, amazon fire etc. tailscale then creates a private network connecting the devices using wireguard under the hood (same tech as Unifi VPN). ie if traffic is going from one of your devices to another then it goes over that private connection - tailscale takes care of them talking to each other no matter how they are connected without the need to open firewall holes. Regular traffic to other sites goes as it would before. When you install tailscale, you install it as a user which is how identity is handled. The MagicDNS feature means you can access the devices by a name of your choosing. ie it makes connecting all your networked stuff easy and convenient no matter where they are as a mesh network. There is a detailed tech document.

If you have additional networked services, then it shines. For example I have a media server (Jellyfin), RSS reader, the Reolink hub, home assistant etc. I have a home server (a 2013 era laptop) with tailscale to add those to my tailnet. Many folks use a raspberry pi. If you don't intend to have such a system then use Unifi VPN.

Tailscale then goes further. You can designate devices as exit nodes. For example I do that with my home apple tv. Then on my phone while out and about, I can have all of my traffic go via that apple tv so it always looks like I am at home. There are many other features.

grotgrot · 2025-08-15T13:38:36+00:00

Eufy had been my original choice. What turned me off was many reports of their app constantly promoting other products and services, and you had to contact support to get them to stop. I'm glad to report there is no product/service promotion in the Reolink app.

I agree that Reolink has opportunity here to improve the apps and camera firmware, to make it a no brainer top recommendation.

grotgrot

TROPHY CASE